Friday, 20 March 2015

Islamic State's Indian ‘martyr’ may be 2008 Delhi blasts accused

Indian counter-terror experts are engaged in confirming whether
Islamic State fighter Abu Abdullah Al Hindi, who was apparently killed
near the Syria-Turkey border earlier this month, was former top
operative of the banned Indian Mujahideen (IM) Dr Shahnawaz Alam.
Azamgarh-born Alam is on the list of those accused in the 2008 Delhi
serial blasts. Five blasts had rocked the Capital in deadly succession
on September 13, 2008, leaving 30 dead. The police probe into the blasts
led to the infamous Batla House encounter six days later.
Alam, a 37-year-old from Sanjarpur village in Azamgarh, was trained
in the use of arms and explosives at a Lashkar-e-Taiba facility in 2003.
He was involved in planting improvised explosive devices under the
leadership of deceased Atif Ameen at Varanasi’s Dashaswamedh Ghat in
February 2005, Mumbai local trains (July 2006) and different locations
in Delhi in September 2008, resulting in scores of casualties. He
crossed over to Pakistan in 2008 and was trained by the ISI in Karachi
in December 2009, according to an Indian dossier presented to Pakistan
in February 2010.
Under his leadership, the IM’s Azamgarh module broke away from the
Bhatkal brothers, founders of IM, over lifestyle differences.

The
Azamgarh men together formed Ansar ul Tauhid (AuT) in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border region in November 2013 and surfaced in 2014
on the sixth anniversary of the Batla House encounter.
The group swore allegiance to IS in October 2014, the audio recording
of which has now become the centerpiece of the Indian effort to track
Alam’s trail of terror.
Three Indian-origin terrorists — Abdul Rehman al Nadvi al Hindi alias
Sultan Armar Bhatkal of AuT, Shaheem Tanki of Kalyan and Abu Abdullah
al Hindi — were apparently killed in fighting with other IS jihadis in
Syria’s Kobane region in late February and the first week of March.

“We
have information of eight other Indian-origin jihadis fighting in Syria.
The deaths of the three have figured in tweets from pro-IS handles with
the posted photograph of Sultan Armar, the cleric who has motivated
Indian youth from Bhatkal to jihad since 2008,” said a counter-terror
operative.

After pledging allegiance to IS, the members of AuT moved to Syria to
join Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s jihadis. The AuT group comprises Alam,
Khalid, Abu Rashid, Abu Rashid Sultan, Chota Sajjid, Afeef, Shafi Armar
and Saleem Ishaki. IM founder Amir Raza Khan is also part of this group.
Alam and Amir Raza Khan have married two sisters from the Rohingya
region of the Bangladesh-Myanmar border.

IM co-founders Riyaz and Iqbal Bhatkal along with Mohsin Chaudhary
and Abu Farhan from Pune have now moved to Lahore from Karachi and are
said to be under the protection of Pakistani agencies.